Saturday, February 15, 2014

Improvements to Bodhi's Chromebook Support

Just a quick update to let folks know about a few updates our special installers for Bodhi Linux on Chromebook hardware.

Acer C720 Chromebook

I've updated the special ISO image for the Acer C720 which I give instructions for installing here. Updates to the disc include fully functional suspend, automatic audio switching over HDMI, and an E17 profile that enables all the function keys on the Chromebook to work as expected:

You will note in my screen shot above that there is also a bluetooth icon on the system tray. I've opted not to include this by default because I know many won't have a need for it. If you want to use the bluetooth on your C720 simply run the command:

sudo apt-get install blueman

And then use the GUI that is installed to connect to/interact with your blue tooth devices.

Samsung ARM Chromebook

Find instructions for installing Bodhi on the Samsung ARM Chromebook here. While I was busy implementing many improvements to the Debian Wheezy based ARM file system, one of our forum members had been working on a Debian Jessie based file system. Late last month he finished it up to essentially get the hardware fully functional under a true Linux OS!

When you run our installer script you are now asked if you want to use the stable or testing release - I would highly recommend selecting the testing release at this point. It includes the same Chromebook specific profile I pictured above for the Acer as well as full OpenGLES support.

The installer script now provides detection for a previous install on the target disc and over writes it (as opposed to making the user manually remove their old install). Another new feature of the installer is support for different install targets. Simply provide the install target as the first argument for the installer script and you can easily run Bodhi on your Samsung Chromebook from a USB flash drive or SD card.

HP 14 and Lenovo X131e

Also - nothing for these guys yet, but I am hoping to pick up an HP 14 sometime this week and get Bodhi going on it. Our same team member who did all of the wonderful improvements to the Jessie filesystem for the Samsung recently picked up a Lenovo X131e and has started work on dual booting this with Bodhi. I will post updates about these when we have something substantial to share.

Wrapping Up

As always, if you run into any issues please open a support request on our user forums as opposed to posting a comment below.

7 comments:

Is it still stuck with ridiculously old (12.04) software? I installed your other image, and then after the distro-upgrader failed I realized that I'd have to hand-compile a sanely recent llvm, I moved back to crouton. As a compiler developer, a significantly old debian distro is indistinguishable from linux from scratch.

Hey Jeff - I thought I was the only one! I've been running Enlightenment (trunk) on my Ubuntu-based Samsung Chromebook for a few months now. I've spent endless hours hacking and tweaking to get everything working.

Here's what I've got going --

- Enlightnment (trunk) - Lid sleep with trackpad disablement- Full EGL/GLES in X11 (75fps in glmark2-es2) in Saucy (105fps in Raring for some reason)- Proper VT switching and sleep in E18 (only mentionable because it broke when I upgraded to Saucy)- Fully working sound with Pulseaudio (not sure about headphone switching this instant)- Bluetooth using bluez4 and NetworkManager for Wifi (w/indicator widgets)The only real nagging issue I've had to deal with is some tearing / vsync issues in GLES apps like Chromium.

I've just started blogging my experience at http://enlightened-chrubuntu.blogspot.com/ but I have a lot of back posts to get up -- I'm curious how our approaches will compare.

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My name is Jeff Hoogland and you've landed on one of my Google pages. I currently work as adjunct faculty teaching mathematics at ITT Technical Institute in Springfield IL. I am a free software advocate and part time code jockey. You can learn more about me from my personal website.

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